The Whistling Season Read Free Page A

put to sleep." Hypnosis? Even if I had the knack of administering it to myself, the nocturnal state of my mind was not subject to command.
    We trudged on toward the beckoning finger of smoke from the kitchen stovepipe next door—which in homestead terms meant half a mile away—neither of us knowing what more to say. Until Damon, who could all but wink with his voice when he wanted to, intoned:
    "Anybody I know? In your big dream?"
    I had to laugh. "What do you think?"
    "I can just see her." Squinching his face into the approximation of a prune, he mimicked:
'Cat got your tongue, boys?
"
    It was like that most Sundays. Once in a great while the Sabbath-day invitation to Father and his omnivorous boys would come from the Samaritan Stinsons, Grover's parents, or from the reliably civic Fletcher family if school board business needed tending to, but standardly we were asked over to our Schricker relatives' for Sunday dinner. The meal itself we always were surpassingly grateful for. Rae Schricker was our mother's cousin, and with the same calm flint-gray eyes and impression marks of amusement at the corners of her lips, she resembled Mother to an extent that sometimes made my throat seize up. Certainly Rae seemed to regard herself as Mother's proxy on earth at the cookstove. Any of us would have had to grant that Mrs. Stinsons mincemeat pie and Mrs. Fletcher's cream puffs could not be bettered anywhere. But Rae operated on the assumption this was our one square meal of the week and tucked ham with yams or fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy into us until we wobbled in our chairs. Meanwhile, George in his whiskery way would attempt to preside over the feast with encouraging injunctions of his own: "Oliver, heavens, you're out of coffee already! Toby, here you go, the wishbone!" I say
attempt
because unlike us, George still very much had a mother, right down there at the opposite end of the dinner table. At these Sunday repasts Aunt Eunice, as we boys were forced to address her, ate sparingly as a bird, preferring to peck in our direction.
    "Old Aunt YEW-
niss
," Damon now crooned in rhythm to his pitcher's motion, and bopped a post dead-center.
    "Go easy," I warned, with a glance toward Toby as he raced Houdini to catch up with us.
    "Maybe she won't've heard," Damon muttered to me.
    "And maybe the cat will get her tongue for a change," I muttered back. "But I wouldn't count on it."
    Father was sending us over first this Sunday noon, as usual. "Tell George and Rae I'll be there in a jiffy," he instructed, his favorite measure of time. It was strange how many last-minute chores in the horse barn demanded his immediate attention when visiting with Eunice Schricker was the other choice. First, though, he had made sure to curry us up, ensuring that we scrubbed behind our ears, slicking our hair down for us with the scented stickum he called "eau de barber," and judiciously working us over with a comb the size of a rat-tail file. It was then that Damon, who hated to have his hair parted, pulled away from under the comb and demanded to know: "How is she our aunt?"
    A perfectly sound question, actually. By what genealogical bylaw did we accord aunthood to our mother's cousin's husband's mother? Particularly when she showed no affinity with the human family?
    "By circumlocution," Father said, which I resolved to look up. "I want you boys," he tapped Damon with the comb, "to tend to your manners over there. It's good practice for when our general domestication happens."
    When, indeed. By mutual instinct, Damon and I had not mentioned to Father the teasing we were taking at school about the nonbiting housekeeper.
("Does she come with a muzzle?" "Is she so old she's a gummer?")
And we were managing to keep a stopper in Toby by telling him over and over that our tormentors were merely jealous. But the housekeeper matter was wearing us down day by day. The letter had gone off to Minneapolis, my best Palmer penmanship setting